The rain only lasted an hour, maybe an hour and a half. Enough time to go home and help reassure the dog that the thunder did not mean the world was ending or that anyone was mad at her, and if she had another Milkbone maybe she’d start to believe that everything was going to be okay. Enough time for my shirt to dry.
If the rain hadn’t come in earlier than expected, I might have pulled off seeing 59 bird species in two hours. But 41 species in an hour was pretty good. Why not just feel satisfied and appreciate things?
Because it felt like coming up short. Like seeing something only halfway through, or maybe a little more than halfway. And at the rate I was seeing birds earlier, 18 more species should only take another half hour.
For some reason I didn’t go straight to Fort Zach. I went to Searstown shopping center, which will always be called Searstown, no matter how much of it they knock down. I was looking for a common myna, my spark bird. Which was dumb. The puddles there were deep enough that my fan belt started to squeak. And the mynas were still hiding from the storm somewhere.
I wised up and went to Fort Zach.
I pulled into one of the parking lots near Angela Street at Truman Waterfront, scanning the tower at an angle I’m pretty sure permanently damaged my neck. I saw the teardrop shape of a peregrine falcon, the first of the season for me, so it was worth it.
It was still raining intermittently when I parked, enough that I left my camera in the car, as it is not waterproof, but brought my trusty Swarovski binoculars with me, as they are.
I picked up my second new species of the afternoon, a lone cattle egret, in the area known as the Back 40.
Over at the moat, an anhinga was on the expected low branch. Walking along the path I scared an iguana, which leapt into the mangroves and scared a green heron, who flew off voicing his intention to speak with the manager.
A merlin, another first falcon of the season, flew by over the bricks of the fort.
In the hammock at the far side of the Back 40 I flushed a dark bird, which was probably a chuck-will’s-widow, but didn’t get a good enough look to count it. As I emerged back out into the open, I caught the briefest flash of yellow, but was confident enough to know it was a prairie warbler as they are one of the two warbler species that breed here, and I see that flash all summer. Also, I saw more of the bird a few steps later.
On the return through the Back 40 I heard the yips, then caught sight of a small flock of barn swallows chaos-ing around in the wind. At the foot of the berm trail, I saw a northern waterthrush, allowing me to ink in a “heard only” species from the morning.
Cardinals are far less common in Key West than up the Keys, but I saw a trio of them — an adult male, a maturing male and a female — in the gumbo limbo tree by the bathroom. In the same gumbo limbo was a black-and-white warbler, then a larger warbler. Correction, a vireo. A yellow-throated vireo, the type of bird you only see once every year or two here. The rarest bird of the day so far.
High up in the canopy, higher than you normally expect to see one, was the defamingly named worm-eating warbler. (All warblers eat worms. Why label those guys in such an unflattering way?)
In the pines, as I was thinking about getting my car keys out, a pair of American kestrels sported in the breeze, completing the trifecta of falcons you can find in the Keys. In the parking lot, when I had my keys out, there was a small gang of purple martins.
As I drove by the tower at Truman Waterfront again I counted six peregrines without needing to slow the car or strain my neck.
Gray kingbirds had been everywhere the week prior, but I didn’t see one anywhere until College Road, and I was curious why he was straggling when all the others seem to have left together.
I was keeping loose count of new species in my head, but didn’t want to stop and check my notes, and I felt I hadn’t hit the goal yet. Which meant I was going to have to leave the island.
It was 4:30 p.m., and every hour seemed to reveal fewer species — a micro version of the lifelong phenomenon that the longer you bird, the harder it is to find something you have not seen before.
I took the jug handle of College Road so I could include muscovy duck without having to slow down, then took a detour down Rockland Drive to scan the salt ponds, where I found a young little blue heron nearly sporting its full adult plumage.
At a salt pond toward the end of Boca Chica Road, a reddish egret slow-stepped through knee- deep water.
When I parked at the end of the road a skinny, piebald, largish dog came up and inquired (with his eyes) whether I had any snacks, then walked away disappointed.
On the barbed wire at the end of the NAS Key West runway sat a common ground dove, thus completing the set of all the breeding doves of the Florida Keys.
There was a floating, undulating carpet of sargassum along the shoreline, and the shorebirds were working it pretty heavily. I picked out a western sandpiper from all the surrounding least sandpipers by the dark legs and the ruddiness in the scapulars, then a semipalmated sandpiper by the dark legs and the shape of the bill.
In a large puddle on the far side of the runway there was a lone black-bellied plover sans the nominate black belly. Further back, almost at the edge of perception, was a bird I suspected was a yellowlegs, which confirmed itself as a greater yellowlegs when it took off and gave off three notes of its signature call.
It used to be possible to walk a few miles farther on the old Boca Chica Road, but a lot of it washed away. Then the Navy put up scary no trespassing signs, and now a fence. I saw what I figured was the last bird of the day, a spotted sandpiper that hopped up from the riprap and bounced his butt a few times. But after I turned around, a small, darkish warbler landed in front of me. I figured it would be the first of thousands of palm warblers I would see this season, but through binoculars the faint bits of yellow in the flank, and then on the rump, made it a yellow-rumped warbler.
Doing the math later it was 25 birds for the afternoon, and 66 for the day. I could take out the heard-only, white-eyed vireo from the morning, the great white heron, because it is still officially considered a color morph of the great white heron, and the rooster and the muscovy ducks, as they are domesticated species and just too easy, and I still had 62 species for the day.
Goal exceeded. Also, that’s enough goals for a while.
